I was reading "After Many A Summer" - Robert E. Murphy's fine historical analysis of why baseball's Giants and Dodgers left New York in 1957 to head West - at the same time that the Yankees and Angels were trying to engage in playoff baseball in frigid conditions in the Bronx.

The connection seemed perfect.

Murphy's book outlines many elements of the great move West that I had never realized. While the book hardly exonerates Brooklyn owner Walter O'Malley for making the decision - the Dodgers were already the most profitable club in baseball, Murphy notes, when they abandoned Brooklyn - it also illustrates the boneheaded nature of civic officials. Even in the early 1950s, O'Malley was enough of a visionary (about 30 years ahead of his time) to realize a new ballpark ought to go up in downtown Brooklyn. Most city leaders, notably Robert Moses, didn't see it that way; Moses was already in love with a far less personable site in Queens that would eventually become the home of the New York Mets. O'Malley realized he would lose Los Angeles and its limitless wealth to some other franchise if he didn't move fast, and officials in New York - then as now - moved at molasses speed.

So the Dodgers left. The Giants had more of an excuse for getting out, since their attendance had been abysmal, although much of that was certainly due to the management of Horace Stoneham - the owner who drove the team into the ground and then used lousy attendance as a rationale for leaving town.

Still, Murphy's central point has everything to do with the ridiculous nature of playoff baseball on late autumn nights in Eastern cities, when little kids are in bed and players wear winter coats and mittens on the bench and fans hug themselves, clench-teethed in the stands, because the weather is more conducive to a bobsled run. There was a time when October baseball had an extraordinary aura of lengthening shadows and autumn sunlight, offering a chance for the rest of us to play hookey around a radio or a television. That provided its own kind of investment for the game, not in profits but in the generational benefits of the national soul.

Then the owners figured out they could make a bundle by shifting postseason games to night, which created abominable weather conditions and meant many folks would go to bed before game's end, but offered big profits in TV proceeds. The deal was done, for the same reason that Murphy graphically builds to in his wonderful history: What the shift of the Giants and Dodgers exposed was the bloodless nature of so many of those who run the game, men and women who take literal financial shelter in the idea of tradition and charm but in reality are in it for one central reason. For the most part, as Murphy relates in painstaking detail, owners and players around baseball CELEBRATED the departure of the Dodgers and Giants in 1957.

What the Brooklyn Dodgers still represent, beyond all else, is a time when we naively believed in something better, something mystic, about baseball.